There is no capacity to kill bitcoin, congressman says

U.S Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), a ranking member of the Financial Services Committee, told CNBC's Squawk Box he thinks “there is no capacity to kill bitcoin.” 

THE SCOOP

Keep up with the latest news, trends, charts and views on crypto and DeFi with a new biweekly newsletter from The Block's Frank Chaparro

By signing-up you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
By signing-up you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

According to McHenry, regulators have no ways of killing an open distributed ledger. However, he believes that new iterations of cryptocurrencies, those that mimic bitcoin and are not fully open or decentralised, can be shut down.

“You can kill off something that is not a true open distributed ledger,” McHenry said, referring to Facebook’s Libra. He believes that if a token is “a commodity or security, depending on how it’s going to be traded and utilised, those are different elements.”